EXILE CINEMA NEVER AS SUPER AS ONCE HOPED

The 20th anniversary of El Super, a comedy-drama about the travails of a Cuban exile who works as a superintendent in an Upper Manhattan apartment building, will be celebrated with a gala screening and party at Miami Beach's Colony Theater on Saturday. When the film was released to critical acclaim and grand prizes at the Biarritz and Manheim film festivals in 1979, it focused attention on Cuban-Americans and the promise of more great films with Cuban or Latin themes.

Made on a shoestring budget, El Super was smooth and smart. However, though many of its makers have pursued cinematic careers with varying success, and though Cuban-American themes have been tried since, the film did not spawn a brilliant new Cuban-American or Latino cinema.

"What made us succeed was our innocence," explains one of the film's producers, Octavio Soler. "We were a group of Cuban-Americans making a film together for the first time and we didn't know just how many things could go wrong." For instance, he recalls with a laugh, "The day we were supposed to start shooting we realized the film stock we had was 35mm, when we were shooting in 16mm!"

But "nothing could stop us," adds Soler, who had already paid dues in Hollywood working as grip in such blockbusters as The Towering Inferno.

"Everthing jelled," says director Leon Ichaso, who went on to make Crossover Dreams, Sugarhill and Bitter Sugar. "It was the perfect moment to make fun of the pain of exile, a topic that was getting stale." Indeed, El Super pokes fun at such Cuban-American sacred cows as the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Reynaldo Medina portrays a veteran of that failed attempt to overthrow Castro as a vainglorious boaster whose exaggerated claims to heroism provide some of the film's funniest moments.

"El Super was a catharsis," says Ichaso. "It said we were here, we weren't going back to Cuba tomorrow, and we could laugh at what we had become." The movie's irreverence shocked some Cuban-Americans who found many of the themes improper, according to Ichaso. "We showed arrogant Cubans, young Cubans assimilating to American culture, Cuban women becoming independent."

And some Cuban-Americans also found improper the fact that the protagonist was not a success story. "He is poor," Ichaso explains, "and things have gone very badly for him." Indeed, the lead actor, the late Raimundo Hidalgo-Gato, "was living those harsh experiences himself," Ichaso says, "his character's emotions were nailed to his own face."

Ichaso co-directed El Super with his brother-in-law, Orlando JimM-inez Leal, who had earned notoriety in the island as a very young man with PM, a cinema verite short about Havana nightlife that was banned by the government. In the '80s, JimM-inez Leal, who works primarily as a director of Spanish-language commercials, co-directed an acclaimed documentary about human rights abuses in Cuba, Improper Conduct.

El Super is based on a play by IvM-an Acosta, who also worked on the screenplay. Ichaso saw the play, and "before the first act was over I knew I was going to make it as a film."

Producer Manolo Arce, who with his childhood friend Soler had been part of the Andy Warhol crowd in New York, also believes that for El Super, "The stars were aligned correctly." But on a more practical level, he admits, "We made it with New York, not Miami, in mind, knowing that New York was where the opinion makers were, and that was an audience we knew very well."

As for what went wrong afterwards in the development -- or lack of it -- of a Cuban-American cinema, 20 years later Arce puts it simply: "Movies cost money."

Ichaso, who recalls making El Super with the electricity shut off in his apartment ("I'd get home at night and light candles"), says, "That is something you cannot do every day. We were young and feared nothing, but we eventually faced the reality of how difficult it is to make movies. After all, El Super was not economically successful."

Above all, Ichaso says, "We didn't know the monster called Hollywood." Ichaso wrote more screenplays about Miami Cuban themes, but "the money never appeared." Finally, a friend got a development deal with Universal for one of those screenplays. But the studio chose to make another movie about Cuban Miami, Scarface, written by Oliver Stone.

"We were offered jobs as consultants, but we turned them down," says Arce. "Perhaps it was a professional mistake on our part. But I think Scarface is a pretty insulting movie for Cubans."

Many from the original team, including actress Elizabeth PeM-qa, worked on another independent film, Crossover Dreams, which was conceived as a vehicle for salsa star Ruben Blades. "It got a lot of great reviews, but we didn't make the money," Arce says.

Something else was at work -- a case of too much too soon, Ichaso thinks. "There were fights inside the group. We each thought we could make it alone. I went to Hollywood by myself to direct television." Ichaso worked on Miami Vice and more recently on Sins of the City, plus a number of television movies.

"But I don't give up," says Ichaso. "Luis Santeiro [a Sesame Street writer] and I wrote a three-part series about 30 years of a Cuban exile family for PBS. When the network came to Miami to look for funding from wealthy Cuban-Americans, they were astonished to find they couldn't get any."

Ichaso is currently writing a story about a Cuban rafter who gets amnesia and doesn't know why there are so many Cubans in Miami. Arce, who has written and produced for PBS and now works in Miami as associate creative director of Intel Direct, is developing a love story set in Miami. Soler, who has made music videos for Blades, Celia Cruz and Marc Anthony, is also now a Miami resident, working independently.

"The other day I ran into Zully Montero [El Super's female lead] at a funeral," says Arce, "and she asked me, 'Why don't we make El Super 2?' It's a great idea, really. But who would finance it?"

Enrique Fernandez can be reached at efernandez@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4797.